WWDC 3/4/5
California. It’s a beau

WWDC WRAP UP
Well the last couple of days have been hetic and

NY Promax
So, I’m apparently not very good at this whole blogging thing apparently. It’s been over a week since I last updated.

OMG ETC.
Yes I’m very very awful…and extremely busy. Right now I’m brainstorming and exploring the vast depths of what we.MTFY will be up to next. It is true that there are already some things in the works, but what I’m working on tonight might be the first to hit the airwaves. In the mean time I’ve updated my Flickr with pics from NY when Layne was at Promax and I was at work. This was Ava’s first time traveling and she did really well and it was overall enjoyable experience.
So this is a brief update.

Found out an old co-worker is here - going to go try and hook up with him now.

Also, Apple always has the best music. Now listening to Peter, Bjorn and John.

I mentioned on twitter that the the girl to guy ratio was about 4,999:1. I’m still floored by this. The good thing about the fact that out of 5,200 people in attendance only have 5 girls waiting in line for the restroom - of whom where press and people working the event. Sad, but true.

So far I’ve met some really great and interesting people. I’m now sitting plugged in and waiting for the intro class to iPhone and Mac development. There are some events tonight and I’ll be coding the rest of the evening, which I’m definitely excited about as the potential for the platform is unfounded.

3G and GPS. $199. Already over 6 million iPhone in the publics hands… boggles the mind at the possibilities.

me.com looks interesting and useful, but my only complaint is that I would have loved it if they had included Timemachine automatic backup capabilities. Hopefully they’ll get there. One thing is for sure - Apple is definitely going to give Google a run for their money in the application department. There are now almost too many good choices, but with the iPhone integration I think Apple has my vote.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Here I’m hoping to just let a little of myself go. To cherish all of what life has to offer and to capture portions of it for the future. At some point there maybe a slide show.

In my second to last post I mentioned that I thought Google is the new Microsoft - just a little less evil.

It seems that some other industry insiders are inclined to agree with me.

From a Wired article reporting on Google’s poor privacy rating today, the privacy watchdog Privacy International states,

One of the points we are making is that Google is the new Microsoft. Five years ago, Microsoft was rightly perceived as the evil empire. But Microsoft has turned the ship around somewhat, and it doesn’t require much tweaking to embed privacy infrastructure into planning processes.

I suppose it can be inferred from these two issues, privacy and the anti-trust issues with locking you into using their software, that Google is falling down the slippery slope of just becoming a large evil corporation where bottom lines are more important than innovative products. I also see the commercialized push of owned assets as an issue that might eventually push Google into becoming the new Microsoft. I can see conversations starting with ‘how do we leverage our assets to earn higher ROI’… Don’t get me wrong, this is a necessary question in any business, but it is also a question where ‘evil’ answers can be found relatively easily.

We still do see Google creating great innovative products such as Google Gears, so all hope is not lost ;]

Previously I’ve used a desktop reader to get all of my RSS feed fixes. Specifically I use Vienna; because it’s good and cheap (free).

I had recently found the Google Reader widget for iGoogle and decided to see if the Google Reader would work for me. So far I enjoy being able to go to any computer and have all of my feeds synced in one place. Between work and home I can just pick up where I left off and not have to worry about re-reading content because it wasn’t marked as read since I had switched computers. I also like that it’s integrated with iGoogle. I can easily see when I have new feeds. The only issue there is that I have so many feeds that they update too often and content gets lost in the shuffle.

I’m still evaluating.

Today however, I noticed an added bonus to Google Reader; it’s new integration with Google Gears. It’s simple - just click a button and all of your content is now accessible offline.

For those who don’t know,

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality

Google Gears is a whole nother post onto itself. It will in fact allow for Google to bridge the gap into creating the killer app series.
I maybe getting ahead of myself, but, Google Gears could be what was needed in order to kill of traditional desktop applications. We’ll see.

Integration with Google applications has begun and I think that Google’s RSS Reader application is definitely interesting fit. Although, Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets, Gmail; every application that they currently have can only be enhanced with Google Gears. I can only hope that when the iPhone comes out it will have the ability to have Google Gears installed and used - imagine the possibilities.

I digress, just thought I would share.

I personally am not a fan of the integration. I would like to be in control of what type of searching I want to do. I wouldn’t mind an aggregated search with multiple types of content, but the choice should be up to the user. I don’t like having certain biased / product placed content (hint: Google now owns YouTube) forced upon me.

This reminds me of the time when I noticed that Google’s results were getting cluttered with useless Myspace pages that would barely mention the search term you were looking for.
Google Images also suffered from this for awhile - they were bringing up too many Myspace pages that contained images you were searching for. The issue I had there was that, as a user, I would like to click on the image and then see other related content to my initial search term. For instance, if I do a search for Madonna in Google Images I would rather see fan sites that include a multitude of those images rather than just a Myspace page that has one Madonna image in their interests section.

In these two instances I feel that Google is lessening the overall power of their search results.

It was actually when I noticed that myspace results were taking over Google that I looked again into other search engines and discovered Snap. Snap is a post on it’s own that I will get to. I’m a creature of habit though so Google was able to win that war when I kept forgetting to go to Snap instead of Google - or when I had to change my Google homepage to be Snap and couldn’t use iGoogle any longer. What can I say, Google is the new Microsoft; just not as evil.

This past weekend I went to NY which also happened to be Design Week up there (aside, you don’t even know how happy design week makes me) and Core77 was nice enough to put together a public Google ‘my map’ of the events for design week in the city.

This map was very useful in showing the relative space between destinations, but gave you no representation of time of events. There is one feature enhancement that I would absolutely love to see to ‘my maps’: integration with Google Calendar.

For instance, let’s say I’m on vacation and I know that there are various events going on that I want to do at various places. I put those events into Google Calendar and include their location. Google calendar would then have a third interface that integrates with ‘my maps’ (like ‘my map of calendar events’) that would plan out your trip based on the time of the scheduled events and their location and then even give you the quickest route and travel times to the destinations.
This could have multiple applications as well - say I want to go garage saling and I want to route out my itinerary before hand.

Another interesting integration point would be to be able to ‘cross section’ two itineraries. Say for instance I am at a conference with some co-workers or a group vacation and I want to meet up with someone at a certain destination; with the cross section we would be able to meet up for lunch or dinner.

For those of you working at Google, please steal this idea.

Anyone out there who has not received an invite to Joost yet and wants one, please leave a comment below with your email address and I’ll hook you up.